As always, you can find the Dobbs v. Jackson decision here.

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Sentence 4 of 5

This sentence is a single claim:

“As Blackstone explained, to be ‘murder’ a killing had to be done with ‘malice aforethought, . . . either express or implied.’ 4 Blackstone 198 (emphasis deleted).”

Here’s the cited quote in Blackstone:

“Lastly, the killing must be committed with malice aforethought, to make it the crime of murder.”

So the claim in Dobbs is true. In a strange coincidence, though, that sentence appears on the same page as another passage cited in Dobbs earlier that says this:

“To kill a child in it’s mother’s womb, is now no murder, but a great misprision : but if the child be born alive, and dieth by reason of the potion or bruises it received in the womb, it seems, by the better opinion, to be murder in such as administered or gave them.”

(Yes, that is a grocer’s apostrophe in “it’s”—there’s a lot of funky punctuation in this document.)

The quote is memorable for the word “misprision,” but the part that jumps out at me is just before that. Dobbs is (it seems) trying to establish how Blackstone lays the ground for a “proto-felony-murder rule” in the context of abortion, but here is Blackstone saying in plain words that abortion is not murder.

Something to keep track of as the various paths of argument wind around the subject.

This is a true claim:

• “As Blackstone explained, to be ‘murder’ a killing had to be done with ‘malice aforethought, . . . either express or implied.’”